HP Officejet 8500 A909a ppd file

I am trying to install the driver for an HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 A909a printer under Ubuntu 10.04. I have followed the instructions for installing the latest version of hplip 3.11.5 and the installation appeared to go successfully. At the end of the installation, I ran hp-setup. The printer was listed on the "Select from Discovered Devices" dialog. I selected it and pressed Next. On the Setup Device page, the name of the printer made sense but the entry for "PPD file" was "(Not found. Click browser button to select a PPD file.). I tried to browse for the file but there are no PPD files in the "usr/share/ppd/HP" directory relating to the HP Officejet Pro 8500.

The funny thing is that when I run hp-setup, the program header says, "HP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.11.5)" but when I type "dpkg -l hplip" the version number is still 3.10.2.

Questions:
1) Is there a PPD file for the OfficeJet Pro 8500 A909a that I can just drop into the "usr/share/ppd/HP" directory?
2) Where can I get that file?
3) Is something wrong with the installation of 3.11.5 when dpkg is reporting 3.10.2?

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

Note: hp-check can be run in three modes:
1. Compile-time check mode (-c or --compile): Use this mode before compiling the
HPLIP supplied tarball (.tar.gz or .run) to determine if the proper dependencies
are installed to successfully compile HPLIP.
2. Run-time check mode (-r or --run): Use this mode to determine if a distro
supplied package (.deb, .rpm, etc) or an already built HPLIP supplied tarball
has the proper dependencies installed to successfully run.
3. Both compile- and run-time check mode (-b or --both) (Default): This mode
will check both of the above cases (both compile- and run-time dependencies).

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.py:127: RuntimeWarning: PyOS_InputHook is not available for interactive use of PyGTK
set_interactive(1)
Device node: /dev/bus/usb/001/003
Mode: 0664

While I appreciate the help, this is line of activity is not getting me closer to a solution. The only thing that appears to be missing from my machine is the .ppd files for the OfficeJet Pro 8500 A909 all-in-one printer. If I had the correct ppd file on my machine I would be able to read it into hp-setup. Whoever has access to the hplip source will also have access to the ppd driver that I need. Where can I get that driver file?

What is the status of cups in your system ? Please run the command
$status cups

Let know us the out put.

The PPDs are generated dynamically from the hpcups.drv file during the "hp-setup". Cups will generate the PPD from the hpcups.drv file. Check whether the cups is in the running state. You can reboot the system and run "hp-setup" command. If its still failing to get the PPD. Post the out put of "hp-setup -g" command.

If you have installed the hplip-3.11.5 from hplip-3.11.5.run file by running command "sh hplip-3.11.5.run", there gets generated a hplip source folder "hplip-3.11.5". You can find the PPD for your printer in the path
hplip-3.11.5/ppd/hpcups/. During hp-setup you can browse to this folder and manually pick the PPD and continue the setup.

Hi Goutam,
Thank you for your help. From what you said in your message, I was able to find the hplip-3.11.5 installation and it was under the /home/<user account>/Downloads/ directory. Inside of the hplip-3.11.5 directory, it looked like a full installation of the package.

Because the 'hp-setup' program was looking for ppd files in /usr/share/ppd/hplip/HP/ directory as its default location, I decided to move the hplip-3.11.5 directory to be under /usr/share/ along side the existing /usr/share/hplip directory. I then tried to run 'hp-setup' but was not successful.

At that point, I followed your instructions and:
1) Rebooted the machine
2) Typed "$ status cups". The output was

$ status cups

Warning: Fake initctl called, doing nothing.

From this, it looks like cups is either not working or not installed correctly.

3) I then did what you said by typing "hp-setup -g" and I navigated to the file

/usr/share/hplip-3.11-5/ppd/hpcups/hp-officejet-pro_8500_a909a.ppd.gz

in the hope that hp-setup would extract the ppd file from the gzip archive. The following dump is what I got from that attempt. I am confused because the version number is still 3.10.2 rather than the 3.11.5 that I tried to install. Do I have a problem with the installation of 3.11.5 so that the right application is not being read?

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

Hi Goutam,
Before I got your message, I noticed that the 3.11.5 installation puts its files in a different directory than 3.10.2. When I went into this directory, I found a gzipped driver file that I gunzipped to get the ppd file for my printer. I then followed the commands you suggested to remove 3.10.2 and to then install 3.11.5. I then ran "hp-setup -g" and got the following output:

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

Searching... (bus=usb, search=(None), desc=0)
/warning: No PPD found for model officejet_pro_8500_a909a using new algorithm. Trying old algorithm...
error: No PPD found for model officejet_pro_8500_a909a using old algorithm.
error: No appropriate print PPD file found for model officejet_pro_8500_a909a
error: Printer queue setup failed. Could not connect to CUPS Server Is user added to "lpadmin" group(s)
error: Fax queue setup failed. Please restart CUPS and try again.

Done.

I've been told that there is a bug with long file names in the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx CUPS package. I've been told that the long file name bug was fixed in CUPS for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. I know that the printer worked fine on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat so I am going to try to upgrade back to 10.10. I had to revert back to 10.04 Lucid Lynx after having lots of problems with 11.04 Natty Narwhal not being able to run the applications that I use. It may take me a couple of days to get time aside to do this but I will post the results when I get them.

Hi Srikanth,
The printer works fine under Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat but it does not work under 10.04 Lucid Lynx. The problem appears to be with CUPS rather than with hplip. Under Lucid Lynx, CUPS doesn't even seem to be running.

The outputs that you have requested have not changed under Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and are as follows:

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

Note: hp-check can be run in three modes:
1. Compile-time check mode (-c or --compile): Use this mode before compiling the
HPLIP supplied tarball (.tar.gz or .run) to determine if the proper dependencies
are installed to successfully compile HPLIP.
2. Run-time check mode (-r or --run): Use this mode to determine if a distro
supplied package (.deb, .rpm, etc) or an already built HPLIP supplied tarball
has the proper dependencies installed to successfully run.
3. Both compile- and run-time check mode (-b or --both) (Default): This mode
will check both of the above cases (both compile- and run-time dependencies).

Copyright (c) 2001-9 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it
under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.

/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.py:127: RuntimeWarning: PyOS_InputHook is not available for interactive use of PyGTK
set_interactive(1)
Device node: /dev/bus/usb/001/007
Mode: 0664